Saw this article linked in today’s TreeFrog daily new email:
Northern California Wildfire Burns in Carbon Offset Project
Excerpt:
A Northern California wildfire is burning in a vast swath of land where trees are protected in exchange for so-called carbon credits.
The Shelly Fire, which ignited July 3 in Siskiyou County, has spread across thousands of acres of land owned by the Portland-based Ecotrust Forest Management, or EFM. The investment firm protects the trees on its land, rather than clear-cut logging them as some neighboring landowners do. Storing carbon on the land in the form of trees allows the company to sell carbon credits intended to offset the harmful climate effects of other activities.
Carbon credits are often sold to companies or individuals who want to make up for other polluting activities. Some companies bill themselves as carbon-neutral because they say the carbon offsets they buy into account for their pollution.
The Shelly Fire has burned across about 11,000 acres of EFM’s 18,000-acre carbon storage project in Siskiyou County. This raises questions about the viability of carbon storage projects in areas prone to high-severity fire.
Much of EFM’s carbon offset plot hadn’t burned for 70 years or more before the Shelly Fire, and as a result was covered with extremely overstocked, unhealthy forests — conditions that can result in high-severity fire that decimates trees.
My comment: This one case does not mean that all carbon offset projects are unlikely to have important benefits. However, it does offer an arguement to those who suggest that we ought to create “strategic forest reserves” to store C02 and protect biodiversity, such as in this paper, which we discussed here and elsewhere.
It does seem logical that if you want to store carbon in trees, you should pick places where trees are least likely to die or burn up.
Or manage the forest so it is healthy and fire-resistant. Maybe Ecotrust was working on that.
I did ask one of those carbon groups to share their prescriptions, but have not heard back.
They are big on selling carbon credits. And selling trees as 2x4s. Not so big on treating surface and ladder fuels. Take a look at the Sentinel 2 satellite images from their ownership where it burned.
The irony here is strong. Not only has a large virtue-signaling project gone up in smoke, but other commenters think that the perfect solution is to tweak the setting slightly to make fires less likely.
This completely misses the scientific point that today’s level of CO2 in the atmosphere (400 ppm or 0.04%) is considerably more beneficial to human existence than 300 ppm. Plants that we depend upon, from trees to food crops, grow much better at higher levels of CO2, up to perhaps 1,500 ppm. Beyond that, there is typically no further enhancement in growth. But below 300, plant growth is curtailed, until it essentially ceases below 200 ppm.
This means that we are near the minimum CO2 for life to exist on this planet and nowhere near the maximum. The Earth had 2,500 ppm CO2 140 million years ago, and life thrived. That slowly decreased to a low of 180 ppm at the end of the last Ice Age, giving rise to massive desertification and resulting in dust storms that lasted tens of thousands of years. We can see the dust in the ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.
Another fact completely missed here is that ‘Virtue Signaling’ forests make no difference to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. In a discussion with John Clauser a few months back, I was lamenting carbon sequestration projects as completely wrong-headed. He said “Look Gordon, they have no hope of success, because they so insignificant to the total picture.” He is correct. Clauser is the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Physics.
Healthy forests are great assets for many reasons but foolish as “carbon reservoirs.”
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
Corbett, Oregon USA
“The Lookout” aka Zeke Lunder did an enlightening series of livestreams on his YouTube channel as the Shelly fire developed. Early on, he talked through the geography, history, and fuels, and accurately predicted the fire would make a major run in the Kidder creek drainage through the EFM carbon offset holdings.
As the fire grew, he shared his perspective on carbon trading schemes in fire-prone landscapes. EFM stakeholders reached out to him, and it sounds like they did create some grant-assisted fuel breaks on the slopes leading toward Etna and Greenview. I haven’t seen/heard how effective these treatments were or weren’t in CalFire’s aggressive containment efforts.
It will be interesting to see what EFM does going forward with their Klamath watershed holdings.
Thanks for the additional info, Kevin!
I’ve wondered about this …. “In the case of California’s carbon-offset program, purchasers of credits or offsets for US forest land must include an additional ‘buffer’ equal to 2% and 4% of the total purchases, respectively, for forest land with and without forest fire reduction programs to ensure a 100-year ‘guarantee’ on forest carbon claims. An actuarial analysis of California’s carbon-offset program indicates that forest wildfires between 2015 and 2021 have already depleted 19% of the buffer over a 7-year period (Badgley et al. 2022); this implies that it is highly unlikely the 100-year forest carbon guarantee will be achieved.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11027-023-10087-0#:~:text=An%20actuarial%20analysis%20of%20California's,carbon%20guarantee%20will%20be%20achieved.
I think this means offsets need to be bigger. (To the extent that they matter to the goal of atmospheric carbon reduction.)
Hi Jon: Occasionally we are in full agreement. The “100-year forest carbon guarantee” is always a case of wishful thinking or sales pitch in the Douglas Fir Region. Never happened, never will. Forests are just too dynamic, whether fire, wind, bugs, floods, or markets, one only has to think of night-and-day or summer-and-winter to realize that forests are constantly changing and 100-year-plans are both arrogant and ignorant. Even if biology wasn’t a factor, human values and social constructs definitely are. And they are always changing. Carbon credits are definitely one area in which the maxim “follow the money” should be the focus. I doubt very much people will have even heard of this strategy 100 years from now.